Consider this for just a moment, right? We have the big three automakers here in America,
Ford, Dodge, and Chevy, and I'm not trying to promote any of them. I'm just wanting to use
them as an example for a second. So whenever we hear that a recall has been issued, especially
here in America, it's generally with a Ford, GM, or Dodge product, and that's because they are the
most commonly used here in America. Now, whenever a recall comes out for something like a Fiat,
that still affects American motorists, but not on the grand scale that it is with owners of
the big three, which is more common. And that's kind of in the same vein of what we're going to
be going into with this skill, Linux insecurities. See, most home users use a version of some
Microsoft Windows, and that's okay. A lot of this is due to the fact that whenever a person goes to
a store, department store, whatever your preference is, and they buy a brand new home computer,
that it's with a pre-installed operating system that's Microsoft-based. And nine times out of
10, that's what I see. That's my experience. Yours may be different. And because of that,
most home operating systems are Microsoft-based. And whenever we hear that a big security breach,
or flaw, or bug, or virus has gone out there, well, it's usually going to attack the most
commonly used thing, which is Windows, especially in that home environment. And that's what we hear
more about. Now, flip around to the other side, and we have our POSIX-based operating systems.
And when we look at actual home usage, we don't get that same share of the market that Windows does.
Go to a department store and try to find a computer with a pre-installed operating system
other than Windows in America, and you will see that that's pretty difficult to do. They do exist,
and just because you buy a computer doesn't mean you can't put your own operating system on it.
And a lot of POSIX-based users, especially Linux and getting into things like Ubuntu, Red Hat,
and whatever, that's what we do when we go buy some of those systems. I've done that many times.
Go buy a brand new computer that's specced out to what we want. It just happens to come with Windows.
And then I'll put Ubuntu on it, for example, and use that instead, because for that specific purpose,
the POSIX-based system is more apt to what I want to be able to use it for.
So, whenever we hear about security flaws or security, lacking of security features in home
operating systems, it's usually affecting Windows, because that's the more common one
used and talked about among the IT crowd and general user population. That doesn't mean that
POSIX-based insecurities don't exist. And we're going to be covering a few of the common areas
in POSIX-based insecurities in this skill and looking at how we can address some of them as
well. This will play into a couple of skills later on when we start going into enumeration
and some of the previous skills as well, especially when we discussed how to use
sudo and some of the tools inside of Kali to penetrate a targeted system.
Now, some of the security features that we discuss in this skill are going to be default
inside of the operating system we're going to be taking a look at. And our target OS for this
skill is inside of our lab, and it's going to be Ubuntu. Later on, we may decide to install
another operating system that's POSIX-based to experiment with that as well. But the reason I
bring all this up is because we have to be familiar with some of the same security features
and baseline settings that other Microsoft-based operating systems have. And understanding those
allows us to be able to go through and have a baseline plan for an attack on a system.
And what we may cover may seem to you like we're kind of going back and doing some of the basics
again. But just let us take a moment. Give me a second here. We're going to get there and go
through and utilize the knowledge that we gained from this skill and apply it to some of the
techniques that we've already covered and will cover throughout the rest of this course. We have
to know what the baseline security platform is, whether it be with the operating system itself,
permissions, or anything in particular like a program that we install on something. And that'll
allow us to be able to go through and take a look at how we're going to use our threat vector
to penetrate that system. We've seen already that we can generate files, fake files, fake services,
and import them to the target systems. But what are the insecurities, I should say,
that allow us to be able to go through and do that? And that's what we'll be taking a look at in this skill.